


the five homes of bianca di angelo

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-01
Updated: 2011-11-01
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:10:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You could be anyone, anyone could be you, and this is you and your brother and a house of many rooms. [AU].</p>
            </blockquote>





	the five homes of bianca di angelo

**Author's Note:**

> done for notworthy, who asked for "Nico/Bianca, red." Written in the second person and contains incest of the sibling kind. You can read here or [@ LJ.](http://antistar-e.livejournal.com/569348.html?format=light)

It's always interesting how, the older you get, the more you think about your childhood.

Your knees didn't look like knobby golf balls back then, and falling down didn't make your skin mottle like the inside of a clamshell, and you didn't know _anything._ Of course, the amount of information about the world that you _still_ don't know overwhelms you in quiet moments, but you still think back to your childhood self and it _amazes_ you how you got by, knowing as little as you did.

Your name is Bianca di Angelo.

You are anybody and anybody could be you.

 

**1.**

To you, your mother was toweringly tall, as thin and imposing as a witch. She wore black to slim herself further and you remember her clearest wearing red lipstick that smelled like paint when you kissed her cheek good-night, a spindly cigarette-holder perched among her fingers. She wore pearls, usually, and when you and your brother were pulling the legs off of centipedes in the bathroom just to see their guts spill out of their baggy flesh, you kept a look-out for your mother by listening for the sounds those strings of pearls made. There were three strands of them, long enough that she would press them into her bellybutton when she was nervous.

You don't remember the house you lived in then. You were a child, and it didn't matter where you lived. What mattered were the people who lived there with you; your mother, your baby brother, and your mother's husband. She called him that, too. "Husband," she would call, swaying through the rooms. "Husband, have you been outside yet today? What kind of coat shall we need to dress the children in?"

"Brother," you say experimentally, keeping your voice low. "Brother, can you fetch me a drink?" and Nico places his palm over your mouth, shushing you.

Your mother dies when you are nine. Your brother is five. The hotel you are living in -- hotel! That's right, it was a hotel in Washington DC, with a lot of rooms that people frowned at you for trying the doorknobs on, but it didn't matter, because if you asked nice, the shadows under the doorframe would tell you what was inside, and the secret is the only thing you wanted to possess -- is blown up. The stone and the mortar in its walls screams in pain, and you fling your hands over your ears to block it out, frightened.

There's a funeral. The coffin smells like pine trees, and its lid is bolted shut. There were a lot of coffins then. 

You stand nearby with your brother, the both of you wearing black shoes with silver buckles. Your tights feel weird and your crotch itches but you can't scratch, and your brother keeps rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hands. He crouches down, peeling blades of grass between his fingers until you pull him up and hold his dirty hand between your own. He keeps his chin tucked down against his chest.

Your mother's husband is not there when the coffin goes into the grave. He is standing several gravestones away, his unbuttoned jacket flapping in the wind, arguing with a man who dwarfs him. The man has a face like a villain, with thin black eyebrows and a nose you could jump right off of. He used to talk to your mother in the hotel lobby a lot, where people could see them. You remember, because your mother would always say, "Bianca, Nico, stay where I can see you," and the man would look at you with eyes so black they had no center, like he couldn't tell the difference between you and the furniture.

The year is 1941.

 

**2.**

The house you grow up in is on a hill. It has shutters the color of cream, and they clatter and bang when a storm comes through, even when you and Nico run through all the rooms trying to close them as the trees in the yard whip around with the force of the winds.

This is the house you remember the most, because this house became your family and your friends. It talks to itself, floorboards creaking and the wires clicking in the night, and there are things that creep and crawl buried in the yard that talk all the time. There are dozens of rooms and skeletons in all the closets -- they cook and clean and when you ask, they teach you and Nico how to do those things, too, their loose jaws rustling like newspaper. The skeletons are the only things in the house that don't have a voice you can hear.

The house belongs to your father, who is not your mother's husband, which didn't seem to matter at the time, because you had compartments in your heart to love them both equally, although maybe those compartments weren't as big as the ones where you put your love for your mother and your baby brother.

"You'll be safe here," is what your father tells you when you are nine. "This is a protected place. I'll come and get you when it's okay to go out. I'll be back."

When you're fourteen, you stop waiting. The war's over by then, you hear, although you're not really sure what war it was, or who was fighting. You pay three pennies for a newspaper in town on your very first outing, your hands shaking very badly and your knees locked rigid with fear, and you learn. You give the newspaper to Nico, and on the way home, he practices reading, eyebrows scrunched together like a housecat's as he tries to keep the letters in the right order.

You and your brother learn to shadow-travel in that house, asking politely and appearing and reappearing in different rooms at will. 

The skeletons chatter at you in alarm, dark sockets following you as you play, racing in and out of darkness.

"Can't catch me, can't catch me!" you lilt and sing-song, your hair flying loose as you pound barefoot through the halls. He catches up with you out in the yard, pinning you down by your wrists like you're a bird and rubbing grass in your face in victory.

The house changes sometimes, modernizes itself with things you've never seen before -- a microwave is one of the first things to baffle you, and a color television appears in the downstairs left parlor while you're asleep. You and your brother watch the Wizard of Oz and you both pretend you aren't fighting the urge to touch the screen, because it's amazing.

There's one room, though, that doesn't change at all, and you never go in it.

You call it the Red Room, because the walls are painted a red so dark it's almost black, like blood, and the furniture is red, the lamps glow with a red light, pulsing like eyes. You never see it, but Nico is the first one to explore it, and what finds in there sends him screaming into your arms, sobbing with shock and fright. As you grow, the Red Room becomes synonymous with everything you're frightened of.

"What do the Soviets have that makes everyone so scared?" he asks you one day on your way home. Your head is full of bicycles -- there was a new one at the shop, gleaming chrome, and you picture what it would be like to fly down the street in one of those -- so it takes you a moment to focus on his question.

You squeeze his hand with yours. You still go everywhere hand-in-hand, even though he's almost fourteen now. Sometimes the other kids in town will come to the ends of their lawns and jeer about it, but they are other people and what you do has nothing to do with them, so you hold your brother's hand. He's growing up, and his fingers are longer now, tangled up with yours.

"Whatever it is, we'll probably find it in the Red Room," you tell him, and you two share a smile. The Red Room is full of secrets, but these aren't the locked-door kind of secrets that are fun and a little naughty, like the ones from the hotel.

The Red Room is full of all the bad secrets, so you keep the door shut and firmly locked, and you tell the shadows under the door to stay quiet.

When you're eighteen, the newspapers tell you that President Truman has declared war on the Republic of Korea, and that the Soviet Union has a bomb, and the way you read it makes it seem like the whole world will turn into a Red Room if you let it. So you decide to go to war.

The year is 1950.

 

**3.**

Your country sends you to Italy to spy on the Soviets. On paper, you're just a legal secretary, but in military code, you're a communications specialist. _Spy_ is what you would be called if you were a man and everyone was a little less frightened of you, you assume, because that's basically what you do. Your brain is hard-wired for languages.

You'd asked the skeletons to produce you a birth certificate, and they did. Your name is officially Bianca di Angelo, and it says you're a little bit older than you really are, that you have a college degree, but that's okay, because the WAC wouldn't have accepted you otherwise.

You live in a boarding house in eastern Italy with six other girls, and your first night overseas, you cry yourself to sleep, your body crumpled so tightly you probably look like a bean, wizened and dried to nothing.

"It's just homesickness," says your roommate, worriedly, holding the trash pail under your head as you retch into it. "It'll pass."

You don't know enough to tell her that homesickness is nothing like this, because you've never been homesick before. You want to ask her why she isn't homesick, but you've already learned that the shadows here are silent and lie flat against the surfaces like swatted flies. You cannot speak to the ground or the walls of buildings. If there are things crawling in the earth, you cannot hear them, and it leaves a void inside of you that you could probably drop a nickel into and never hear it hit bottom.

More than that, you miss your brother.

You've never been away from him, not once, not in fourteen years, since the moment your mother came home and showed her husband this baby-like thing that you're supposed to just like instinctively, the way you love sunlight or squishing earthworms in the rain. You should have thought of this before you left, but how could you? Imagining life without Nico would be like imagining a world without air to breathe, or a body without blood to bleed.

Without Nico, without the shadows, without the sound the earth makes in sunlight ... it is like the very marrow of your bones is gone.

Italy is your mother's home, so on one of your weekends off, you find the town she was born in on a map and you go, just to see. This is war-torn, Cold War Europe, so it takes a very long time and your papers are scrutinized so many times you're afraid they'll wear through, but when you get there, the late afternoon sun bleeding out over the hills and the trees spreading out against the sky as if they've been painted on, you find your mother's husband out in the garden, whacking weeds.

He straightens up and sees you before you can decide if you want to go on your way. He shades his eyes and waves.

You wave back, but that's it. He doesn't recognize you, standing there in your American uniform with new nylons and shoes that shine, even though he raised you as his own, until your mother died and he didn't have to anymore.

This is not your home, Bianca, any more than the boarding house is.

You and three other girls are sent back to the States at the end of your tour, and the instant your rickety little plane lands on US soil, your head explodes with sound and feeling; the earth underneath the tires singing a familiar summer song and your brother, waiting for you on the other end of the tarmac. You know exactly where he is because all the shadows are looking for you; it's like every single shadow in the entire country has been made to look for you, like Nico asked every single one of them.

He runs at you the instant they let you go, and you collide together like continents, his arms around your neck and your feet tripping over each other. 

You cling to him, your head ringing, but it's like the earth has righted itself underneath your feet.

"I couldn't hear you," he's babbling, you realize eventually. "I couldn't -- the entire time you were gone, I kept trying to find you in shadow and I couldn't hear you. I couldn't find you. I didn't know -- I _didn't know --"_

"I don't think it works outside America," you manage to breathe out. "I ... I wonder where it comes from, if it doesn't work anywhere else."

He buries his face in your neck. "The Red Room?" he offers. "I don't know, I think it comes from the Red Room."

You frown a little bit, because the Red Room is for things you're frightened of.

"I couldn't _hear_ you," he explains, and you hug him tighter, like you can put him into your bones and carry him with you everywhere.

You serve three more tours, and while you're away, Nico grows into limbs as thin as spaghetti noodles, grows up. Some of the other girls start giggling behind their hands when they see him, and especially when he holds onto you like the two of you could grow roots into that very spot.

You don't get it, but then the Korean War ends, and the US military thanks you for your service. You go back to America for the final time, and this time, Nico doesn't come running into your arms like a child.

This time, he's taller than you, and he takes your face between his hands, which are big enough to hold it, and he kisses you like it's an answer. You close your eyes and lean into it.

The year is 1953.

 

**4.**

The rest of your life, arguably, is lived out on that mattress that you two take from your father's house. You find an apartment in New York City, which your roommate from your WAC days always said was the most amazing place, and you live together, you and your brother, as husband and wife.

"Brother," you will say to summon him from the other room, and sometimes instead you will say, "Husband."

You tuck the mattress underneath the window, so sunlight is the first and last thing you see every day. You live in that nest of blankets, sitting cross-legged and eating from the bowls you bought for a quarter at a garage sale upstate, or lying against Nico's chest, struggling to read and doing it anyway. Or, sometimes at night, sometimes during breakfast, sometimes when you come home from school in the middle of the afternoon, you will pin your brother to that mattress and ride him until your spines arch with wanting.

Sex isn't really the big deal everyone makes it out to be -- it's not the be all or end all of all things, it's just one more way you and Nico can say "I love you," but it's not any more important than the coming home, or the quiet meals, or the way you'll still chase each other up and down and around the stairs, like children playing tag.

You make a good living. You've always been really lucky with money, so the two of you make some good investments and you work. You never find anybody like you, but it doesn't matter, because you and Nico are each other's world and you don't need to be like anybody.

When you are thirty-four and he's twenty-nine, they draft him to fight the Viet Cong. He comes back with shadows in the deeps of his eyes, locked away where you can't reach them, and looking at them makes you think of the Red Room for the first time in years. You asked to be enlisted, so you could fight with him, but you were denied. It was the 60s, when you could do anything.

Except, apparently, fight a war for the country you loved with the person you loved.

After it's over, the city doesn't mean as much as it once did -- loud noises make Nico startle like a cat with its tail trod on, and he'll clamp his hands over his ears whenever they walk past a hospital.

"I hate the sound of people dying," is all he says when you ask him.

You hold his hand, listening to the shadows chattering the secret thoughts of the people who cast them.

You have the money saved up. You start looking at places out in the country, someplace to settle your bones for good.

The year is 1972.

 

**5.**

So here you are, Bianca. This is where you've wound up, standing at your kitchen sink and watching your brother park the car under the awning because it's supposed to snow tonight. You are seventy-two years old, and most of the outside world is alien to you now, like something from the War of the Worlds landed among you. Cordless phones shaped like pillboxes and TV streaming on your computer -- you'll never catch up, not at this rate. You know a lot, so much more than you did at fourteen when you ventured into the outside world for the first time, but you still don't know enough.

"Brother," you call when you hear the door open. "The last of the fish soup is missing from the fridge. Was that you?"

"Yes," he calls back, but he sounds uncertain. 

His hearing aid probably isn't turned on, you assume. "You know what that will do to your gut," you chide. "You're going to spend the whole night on the toilet."

"Love you too," Nico answers, and you hear him shuffle into the living room. Chuckling, you turn away from the sink.

Your father is sitting at the kitchen table.

You back up against the sink hard enough to make the dishes in it rattle, your breath stoppered in your throat before it can become a scream.

"I have been _looking_ for you two," Hades says, his voice well-deep, like it's coming straight out of your memories. "You left the house!" And then he seems to look at you, _really_ look at you, your white hair that's gone thin on top and your golf-ball shaped knees, and adds, "And got ... very old." His eyebrows knit. "I was hunting for sibling pairs, though. How did you escape my detection for so long?"

You find your voice. "We're registered in the state of New York as a married couple," you tell him, and shrug. "Better tax benefits."

He nods, accepting this in stride. "Probably for the better," he says gravely. "If I was looking, so would have my brothers. I ... I probably should have told you when you were younger, and I cursed all the skeletons in the house to silence, but --"

"But our uncle Zeus killed our mother and wanted to kill us too, so that you wouldn't have an advantage in the Second World War and his children would," you finish for him, nodding. At his look, you say, "We know who we are. We know who you are. We've known for a very long time."

"How?"

You shrug. "Google."

You talk some more, and then you bring Nico in to meet him. The sun sets outside the window, and it starts to snow.

"What was in the Red Room?" Nico blurts out, half-way through Hades's rant about how unreasonable Hera has been for the past couple (hundred) Summer Solstices.

Hades, to his credit, doesn't even need to ask for elaboration. "Fear itself," he goes, and doesn't really look apologetic. "You had to learn sometime." He tilts his head some, the corner of his thin mouth curving ever-so-slightly. "It's a pity you couldn't have been born later, or that I couldn't have found some way to trap you in time like the immortals. I could really use children like you in the battle that's coming."

Nico snorts softly. His palm is soft against yours.

The year is 2004.

 

-  
fin


End file.
